CALL for teaching pronunciation, speaking and listening activities

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. 

Henry Ford

It is unbelievable that the Week 3 is almost at its end. The week was full of challenges. Oh, how many useful things we learned. Those things will be rewarding for our students and for us, too. In this week, we had to read the materials for CALL teaching of pronunciation, speaking and listening activities. At first, I will mention developing listening skills with authentic materials. In my opinion, this skill is an important part of learning the second language. There are many useful web links which can help us to create a motivated learning atmosphere. Students can also boost their listening skills by listening to the native speakers of English. If you want to read more, you can just visit the following page:  http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc . I have discovered a lot of useful web links which can be advantageous for teaching and learning ESL. I will mention one of useful ESL learning and teaching tools. It is the radio and TV station which are designed for learners of ESL. Students can choose the topic their want to listen to and they can also pick out which level is suitable for them. If you want to find out more, it is available at: http://www.eslradio.net/.

 The second section deals with teaching pronunciation. I was so intrigued by this thread, so I read the article at http://www.openstarts.units.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/2850/1/bus%C3%A0.pdf . I discovered many useful pieces of information about this topic. One of the sentences that caught my eye was that ‘the goal of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) systems is to provide learners with private, stress-free practice with individualized and instantaneous feedback of information’. And one of the greatest advantages of the application of CALL is that it offers a private environment for working on pronunciation without fear of the number of repetitions needed for full comprehension or accuracy of production. This way of practice enables students to get rid of their fear which is often present. The most interesting thing is that there are many electronic tools for speech analysis. Students can record their voices. Then, they can listen to it and if it is necessary to make some corrections they can do it by recording their pronunciation again.

The second topic is The Employment of CALL in Teaching Second/Foreign Language Speaking Skills. This topic is also an interesting one. I also discovered many useful pieces of information about this section and it is available at: 

www.edfac.unimelb.edu.au/research/resources/student_res/postscriptfiles/vol3/vol3_1_gong1.pdf.     

There are also many useful tech tools which can help students to improve their skills of listening. One of them is ‘Conversation’. It is a type of software designed to allow users to “talk” to computers. This software also allows learners to choose a situation, study the dialogue, record themselves and then play the recording back and compare it to the model.

  

While reading about CALL for all three activities, I realized how much these modern tech-techniques of teaching and learning will contribute to boost students’ skills and it will also build their self-confidence to promote these skills even outside the classroom.